No more than a few thousand tigers now survive in pockets of Asia, a continent they once roamed far and wide. The largest of them, the Siberian tiger, is today almost entirely confined to the little-populated Russian Far East. Nearly extirpated before World War 11, Panthera tigris altaica made a comeback in subsequent decades. When poaching and habitat depredation following the implosion of the Soviet Union once again threatened extinction, a group of American wildlife biologists led by Maurice Hornocker joined with their Russian counterparts in founding the Siberian Tiger Project to study and protect this besieged race. Peter Matthiessen journeyed to the Russian Far Fast and other remaining tiger territory to witness for himself the species' present condition and to understand its possible fates.
